Editorial Matters

By Cheryl Morgan

World Fantasy Con was great fun, and it was a pleasure to see so many good friends again. Special thanks to Gigi for being such a good roommate.

The main point of the convention for me, however, was to do business. I commissioned a bunch of feature articles, and picked up a lot of review copies of books, but I’m now feeling much less confident about Emerald City’s ability to attract advertising.

It turns out that sites like Locus Online and SF Site get their adverts through an agency called Gorilla Nation. The big publishers produce their ads, and Gorilla Nation sees to their distribution. Major publishers, at least in the US, are highly unlikely to deal direct with a web site.

The problem here is that you have to have a certain level of traffic before Gorilla Nation will place ads with you. It is not entirely clear what level of traffic they want, but given that they haven’t bothered to respond to my request for clarification I suspect that I have no chance of meeting their requirements unless my number of readers increases by at least an order of magnitude, possibly two.

Part of the problem is that Gorilla Nation measures traffic in terms of unique page views. Someone reading this issue of Emerald City as a single web page would generate one page view. If I put each review on a separate page that would miraculously up by traffic by an order of magnitude. I’ll probably do that for the next issue, because I can see why advertisers like it, but it almost certainly won’t be enough to make them take notice.

That leaves us with small press publishers. As you will have seen, some of them have tried sponsoring the site. As yet I don’t know what, if any, results they have had. But for a small press the equation is even more stark. They generally can’t afford to pay for things like visibility. They want sales. And if ads here don’t pay for themselves (that is if you folks don’t buy books as a result of the ads appearing) then the ads will not get bought.

Which brings me back to where I thought I would be when I started this. I need more traffic. A lot more traffic. Which is where, I hope, the feature articles will come in. Watch this space.

As to next month, I now have a copy of Al Reynolds’ Pushing Ice. I have novels by James Patrick Kelly, Louise Marley, Jack Yeovil and Conrad Williams. There’s an anthology from Chris Roberson, a collection from Robert Reed, and a novella from Steven Erikson.

And (at last) I am getting to read Temeraire. Please don’t bother me until I have finished.

Best wishes,

Cheryl